inequality

Five years ago, I agreed to speak on camera with Canadian filmmaker Céline Baril when I was in Montreal. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the film was about except, loosely stated, the state of the world. I of course gave my overview of the commons. The film was released in 2017 in Canada, but it didn’t seem to be generally available otherwise, even on DVD. To my great pleasure, I recently discovered that Baril’s film, 24 Davids, has been picked up by Amazon Prime Video streaming.

I recommend the film, and not just because of my cameo role. It’s a compelling meditation on life with a deep emotional undertow -- a provocation to reflect on the hopes, anxieties, and realities of the world today as seen through the eyes of twenty-four people named David (or “Davide” or other variants) on three continents. I’m pleased to be among these other Davids, even if our shared first name is the mono-gender contrivance by which we’re connected. (Ah, but what was Baril’s methodology in choosing us?)

Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler gave attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos a dire warning about future instability if the “Uber-ification of all services” continues. In his intense six-minute talk, “Challenges of the Sharing Economy,” Benkler notes how open networks and collaborative production models have led to the “destabilization of the firm," and ultimately threaten to bring about “the potential reorganization of the entire services sector.”

Professor Yochai BenklerIn light of this epochal shift, he declares, the critical question is: “Will [this shift] allow embedding economic production in the same kind of social solidarity trust models that we saw with the emergence of Wikipedia? Or will the externalization of risk onto the people formerly known as employees create severe disruption?”

The big challenge today, he argued, is that the social and the political have diverged, as demonstrated by the Occupy movement. And this leads to worrisome social pressures that the political system is disinclined to address.

I realize that Benkler must have been under a strict time limit -- he was talking quite rapidly for this talk -- but it sure would be nice to hear his proposed solutions for re-integrating the social and the political in functional ways, and how he proposes moving that agenda forward. But at least the Davos crowd was alerted to this fundamental political challenge. Whether they will deign to recognize the issue and move beyond their adulation for the Uber, Airbnb and other lucrative forms of network monopoly is another matter.

Everybody talks a lot about economic inequality, but there don’t seem to be many credible proposals out there, let alone ones that have political legs. French economist Thomas Piketty documented the deep structural nature of inequality in Capital in the 21st Century, but the best solution he could come up with was a global wealth tax. Good luck with that!

What a pleasure, then, to read Peter Barnes’ new book and discover some sensible, practical ideas. Barnes is a writer, entrepreneur and long-time friend; we worked together a decade ago with the late Jonathan Rowe in exploring the great potential commons in re-imagining politics, policy, economics and culture. The author of pioneering policy ideas in Who Owns the Sky? and Capitalism 3.0, Barnes has just published With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough (Berrett-Koehler Publishers).

The book aims to reduce inequality not through the tax system or education and training, but by inventing new commons-based institutions that can generate nonlabor income for everyone. The secret of the wealthy, of course, is that they don’t depend on salaries or wages, but on investment income from their equity assets.

So how might commoners pull off this trick? By generating income from common assets. The money won’t come from government spending or redistribution, or from new taxes on business. It will come from commoners seizing control of the shared equity assets they already own – the atmosphere, airwaves, the sovereign right to create money (now enjoyed by banks), and the public institutions that make stock markets and copyrights possible.

These equity assets belong to all of us. Unfortunately, most of the benefits from these assets have been privatized by banks, oil companies, telecom companies, the culture industries, depriving us of income to which we, as common property holders, are entitled.

Barnes proposes renting out various common assets to businesses that wish to use them. This is a well-accepted principle – to pay for something owned by someone else. Why should companies get a free ride on public assets? Barnes proposes charging corporations for the use of the airwaves, the pollution sink of the atmosphere, and the right to monopoly protections such as copyrights, trademarks and patents. Revenues from our common assets could be channeled into independent, non-governmental trust funds that would then regularly generate dividends for everyone.

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." So begins a significant new report by the New Economics Foundation in the U.K., quoting economist Kenneth Boulding. "The most pressing problem facing humanity now," says the report, The Great Transition, "is how to share scarce planetary resources in ways that are just, sustainable and support the well-being of us all."

The private jet is always cast as the ultimate status symbol. Flip through The New Yorker and other upscale magazines, and you are invited to enter the fantasy world of private aviation, where there are no crowds, no long security lines and no boring waits in noisy airport lounges. You can just drive up to the plane (in your limo, of course) and jet to wherever and whenever you want!

A focus on peer-organised initiatives for relocalised agriculture, platform co-operatives, cosmo-local production, urban commons, community wealth building, and sustainable care work, among other approaches. Participants will leave with a keener sense of specific models for actualising social and economic change; a vocabulary and concepts that open up new vistas of possibility; and a mental map of the leading people, projects, websites, and movements developing new institutional forms. More information at Stir to Action.